Firefox faces challenges as it matures

Then there's the issue of keeping the growth momentum going, which necessarily involves appealing to users outside of Firefox early adopters. These core users are mostly technically savvy people comfortable with open source software and eager to take advantage of Firefox's extensible architecture to customize the product, analysts say. Places to find new adopters are in the massive consumer market and in the corporate market, they say. "One could argue they're getting [close] to saturating that portion of the market of technically adept users," said Gartner's Valdes.

To appeal to mainstream individual users, Firefox needs to remain a step ahead of Microsoft in features and innovation, analysts say. However, some don't see anything close to a massive migration from IE to Firefox happening any time soon.

"IE works perfectly fine for the vast majority of consumer, mainstream users," Jupiter's Gartenberg said. "I don't think we'll see massive mainstream consumers opting to use Firefox."

Regarding the enterprise market, Mozilla officials acknowledge that, at least for now, their focus remains on individual users, not on making the browser attractive for IT departments that may in turn roll it out to their corporate users.

That needs to change, said Gartner's Valdes. "If they want to keep growing their usage base, they need to address the needs of different sectors of the user population, including corporate users," he said.